The thirteenth amendment emancipated the slaves instantly and not gradually, the fourteenth made them complete citizens of the United States and of the particular State wherein they reside, and the fifteenth practically conferred unlimited suffrage upon them. The Hayti, and not the Jamaica, precedent was followed. The brothers that had conquered were blind from civil fury: and they had been brought by the root-and-branch abolitionists into full persuasion that the southern negroes were ready for and entitled to these high privileges. By the amendments they confidently tried to railroad the African slave in one instant of time up the long steep to the topmost Caucasian who had established liberty and self-government over a continent, and made it perpetual. We pray that they be forgiven, for they knew not what they were doing. Had the white population of the south been at the time as disproportionate to the black as it was in Hayti in 1794, it would also have been massacred. But the section was full of late confederate soldiers. When the fates had decided against the dear cause for which they had fought for four years they accepted peace in good faith. Now their conquerors turned loose a horde of black plunderers to despoil the little that war had left. When I read Professor Brown's inability to say whether the work of the Ku-Klux was justifiable or not,[157] I thought of Christ's asking if it was right to do good on the sabbath day. The lesson to be learned here is that while it is now too late to make the thirteenth amendment what it ought to have been, and there is perhaps no need to alter the fourteenth, yet there must be abrogation of the fifteenth as to the great mass of southern negroes. In fact this has really come already through the white primary. Booker Washington is a great, a decisive authority on this question. He counsels the negroes to eschew politics. This is wise. It is the solid interest of the negro masses that they accept the inevitable; just as the south gave up slavery when we could hold on to it no longer.